How to Change Behaviour at Work

Squiggly Careers

AmazingIf

Careers, Business, Management

4.9 • 838 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Helen and Sarah borrow brilliance from a powerful Harvard Business Review article by James Elfer, Siri Chilazi, and Edward Chang on the science of behaviour change at work.They unpack the “Four T’s” model, a practical framework used in big organisations to drive measurable behaviour change. But instead of keeping it theoretical, they apply it to real team challenges like: - Reducing interruptions in meetings - Prioritising important work over easy tasks - Keeping objectives alive (not just setting them) - Moving from “busy” to genuinely impactful You’ll hear how to get specific about the behaviour you want to change, design simple interventions that fit your culture, introduce them at the right moment, and measure whether they’re actually working. If you’ve ever said, “We know what to do… we’re just not doing it,” this episode will give you a structured, science-backed way to close that say-do gap, without adding more noise to your workload. Episode 539 🦞 Learn Like A Lobster: 🇺🇸PRH US - https://bit.ly/3KxTeBn 🇬🇧 Amazon UK - https://bit.ly/46lj8Av (00:00) How to Change Behaviour at Work (01:00) The Four T’s explained (05:49) Step 1: Target the right behaviour (07:02) Step 2: Build your theory of change (08:28) Step 3: Make it timely (09:27) Step 4: Test the effect (10:48) Real examples from teams 📚 Resources Mentioned To Change Company Culture, Start with One High-Impact Behavior: https://hbr.org/2026/01/to-change-company-culture-start-with-one-high-impact-behavior For questions about Squiggly Careers or to share feedback, please email helenandsarah@squigglycareers.com More ways to learn about Squiggly Careers: 📩 Download our free career tools: https://www.amazingif.com/toolkit/ 🦞 Join the Learn Like a Lobster Sprint: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNQl9gsac8BXnWe2qoGuHkLKwsygjP_Ma&si=l7kODG3JpopH0Irz 📮 Get Squiggly Careers in Action in your inbox: https://bit.ly/SquigglyCareersInAction 📚 Read our books: The Squiggly Career and You Coach You: https://www.amazingif.com/books/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Helen and I'm Sarah and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we borrow some brilliance from things we've been reading, watching, listening to conversations that we've had, which we think are relevant for you in your squiggly career and we take those topics and turn them into ideas for action.
0:18.9	And Sarah has picked today's borrowed brilliance topics,
0:21.9	so I'll hand over to her to let us know what we're going to be talking about.
0:24.9	So we're going to be exploring how to change behaviour at work.
0:29.8	Oh, you're trying to give me feedback, is that why?
0:32.0	And we're going to be doing this live.
0:34.8	This is based on a brilliant HBR article that was written recently by one of our friends, James
0:40.9	Elfer. And James is the founder of a behavioural science kind of consultancy or practice.
0:47.5	Practice is probably a better word called More Than Now. Definitely worth a follow on LinkedIn.
0:52.9	You know when you follow some companies and people and you just think,
0:57.0	every time I read something, I'm that bit smarter than I was five minutes ago.
1:00.6	That's what I want LinkedIn for.
1:02.9	And he had two co-publishes, Siri, Chilazi and Edward Chang.
1:07.8	So the article is the three of them together.
1:10.6	And what they talk through is this
1:12.3	scientific model of behaviour change. So what they have done is some very large scale
1:18.3	behaviour change work in really big organisations, so often with more than 5,000 people at once.
1:24.2	So they're trying to figure out, I don't know, let's say we need everybody to
1:29.2	write objectives and they don't write objectives today or have better quality career
1:34.0	conversations and they test all these usually relatively small interventions, but then they
1:41.2	really rigorously figure out what works and what doesn't. So they've kind of got
1:46.2	this four-step model, which I'm going to talk you through, so we're kind of all up to speed. And then
	...

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